In 1914, Henry Ford introduced the assembly line and said, he would double the pay of factory workers from $2.50 to $5.00 per hour and you can work 8 hours per day instead of 9. Kicking off the race of making products for the masses—average stuff for average people. In this new social contract, the working class bought in. Give the factory a hard day’s work and in return, you can have your pocket full of cash. Eventually, this evolved to extra forms of security like healthcare, dental, and retirement. The American Dream was now realized.
Before the Ford Assembly Line, cars were handmade. It initially took 12 working hours to produce one car. Ford was able to reduce that time to a mere 93 minutes. So instead of having 100 people building 1 car, you have thousands of factory workers working on one specific part over and over again on many cars. The goal was to break down large tasks into smaller ones. While repetitive, you can then move even faster and cheaper with fewer defects. Now you no longer needed each worker to master every part of the assembly line, you just needed one person to master one part of the process. By reducing the amount of skill each job that each laborer had to do, you can now replace them with someone cheaper. By applying this process all across the factory, The Ford Assembly Line revolutionized production making average stuff for average people.
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